For modern computer systems including semiconductor devices and buses, validation systems/tools incorporating logic/traffic trace probes are used to debug and validate new systems and boards for shipment, and also to quickly diagnose field return issues that may be design or process related or both in order to avoid costly product recalls. To support the bandwidth of ever-faster semiconductor devices such as microprocessors and so forth, the data rates on the buses that connect such devices to memory, graphics and peripherals must constantly scale to higher rates. Interactions between such devices are observed for purposes of logic validation, in order to debug the devices and ship product.
Probing of various data buses such as input/output (I/O) buses has been done using various direct-attached methodologies. Example methodologies include resistive-based probe technology connected to a logic analyzer. However, as bus speeds scale to higher data rates, such probing may cause signal integrity issues for a link under test (LUT).